"I'll pick the launch of the Facebook platform. In little more than two years Facebook have created a game platform that has grown to more than 250 million monthly active players - faster than any game platform has grown. And most of the people playing aren't even gamers."
Facebook has long been known for successful crowd efforts (just yesterday the campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to Christmas No.1 ahead of XFactor winner Joe McElderry paid off and had over a million group members) but I'm interested in the middle ground: is there space on to create something as successful as Farmville but with a more regular purpose - like exploring media or just buying groceries? There's a different level of sophistication applied to games in terms of the tools given to the end user (and therefore the motivation to keep going back) than is typically given by smaller utility/fan apps. What else can a brand do to empower the end user?
*I'd previously thought that my mother was just idling her time away on the internet and had scarcely considered that she was a natural futurologist. My suspicions were aroused when it turned out she was a very early adopter of
Bing (she likes the daily pictures) and whilst I bemoaned the amount of time she spent on Farmville, once again she was simply pointing to the future of technology. She also preferred Olly Murs to Joe McElderry which is perhaps the exception that proves the rule although time will tell which of those will be more famous. I typically back her on these things...
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